ROBERT B PARKER'S BULL RIVER BY ROBERT KNOTT

When I reviewed Ironhorse, the first of Robert Knott's continuations of Robert B Parker's Cole & Hitch westerns, I said I thought that the book lacked space for the heroes and villains to interact (you can read the whole review here), meaning a promising set-up is allowed to peter out. Bull River suffers from almost exactly the same problem, which is a shame because the set-up is, if anything, even better.

Virgil and Everett have captured a bizarre Mexican bandit known as Capitan Alejandro, and when they deliver him to San Cristobal they discover the local bank has been looted by its own president, who later turns up beaten comatose, with his wife disappeared or kidnapped by the actual robbers, after a Friends Of Eddie Coyle-style robbery. Which puts Cole & Hitch on the hunt, and coincidentally enough, the Capitan knows the robbers and where they might be.

As in the first novel, we then get a lot of traveling, back and forth, and not really enough tension and precious little confrontation. You can see where the former is waiting to build, especially when the boys are on a train with a Mexican officer who's clearly suspicious, but it never really does, and both the major shootouts are relatively perfunctory, because with Parker they were all about personality, and expressed verbally, whereas here they are diagrammed and drawn, in both sense of the latter word.

More important, however, is the interplay of Cole and Hitch. Everett Hitch narrates, telling Cole's story more than his own, but these two are not like Spenser and Hawk as much as they are the two parts of Spenser: the ego (Cole) and super-ego (Hitch) moderating the gunfighter's id. It's important to get that dynamic expressed in their conversations, but Knott's not able to do that, not even in the other situation where the two express different parts of the Spenserian being: relations with women. Even when Hitch relaxes comfortably with another of the 'liberated' women he seems to encounter regularly, we don't get the obvious contrast with Cole's relationship with Allie French. This lack is striking, because the bank president's wife could well be another Allie, and you would expect that possibility to be noted more than in passing.

Cole & Hitch are such a good pair of characters, and so well delineated by Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen, that their personalities, even the shadow of them, can carry a story enough to keep the reader going. But there isn't the frisson of doubt that Parker managed; the nature of Hitch's protective worry, the slight hint of self-doubt that Allie brings about in Virgil. I miss that.

Bull River by Robert Knott
Berkeley Books $9.99 ISBN 9780425272305

VIGGO MORTENSEN DISCOVERS EVERYBODY HAS A PLAN

Everybody Has A Plan is a powerful gothic noir tale of two brothers who grew up in the Tigre Delta of Argentina. Agustin has left his past behind, becoming a children's doctor in Buenos Aires, where he seems to be drifting out of his life, his marriage, and his very existence. He sits alone in their flat, the gulf widening between him and his wife, played with great outward chill and inward anger by Soledad Villamil. Pedro is the brother who stayed behind, to live a life of crimes both petty and serious (including kidnapping) and living for the day, the traditional getting by of the Delta natives, often at the expense of the Buenos Aires-type weekend and summer people. But when Pedro discovers he has incurable cancer, he decides to visit his long-estranged brother.

The visit has a simple reason; Pedro is terminal, and wants his brother's help in terminating his life. And when he dies, Agustin, whose relationship to his own life is terminal, leaves his brother's body behind in the tub, and goes back to the house where he grew up, pretending to be Pedro. As his wife will say to him, when he is briefly in jail, and she realises what has happened, 'you would rather be in prison than be yourself with your wife', which defines the kind of prison in which Agustin sees himself.

Viggo Mortensen, who spoke Spanish as a child in Argentina, plays both brothers, but of course here there is an added twist, as he is playing one brother playing the other. It's a brilliant performance, full of the uncertainties that define Agustin in relation to his past, a past he is incapable of escaping. More than that, by assuming Pedro's identity, he also assumes Pedro's choices. Agustin might enjoy the life of a simple honey-maker, Pedro's erstwhile occupation—and you might see it as the choice between the mind and the body, the id and the ego, but it creates for Agustin a responsibility as much as a freedom. Agustin has, in his mind, been living for other people's expectations, their dreams, while Pedro lives only for himself.

Because Pedro has been involved with some serious crimes, Agustin falls into the world of their childhood friend, Adrian, played with psychopathic relish and Johnny Hallyday-ish charm by Daniel Fanego. Adrian senses the change, recalling the brother whom he felt unequipped to survive in their environment, and makes the most of it. Also sensing the change is Rosa (Sofia Gala Castiglione), the young woman who is seemingly trapped in Adrian's web, or in the Delta world he, as a force of evil, represents. This is another prison, and Rosa soon becomes the person who has the ultimate plan, which is to simply leave it all behind. We realise this is not what Agustin has done; he has left one part of himself and returned to another, but he has not found a new, total self at all. And perhaps there is no room for change. It isn't really a plan at all, and throughout the movie, no one's plans seem to bear fruit. But as Mike Tyson famously said, 'everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.'

Writer/director Ana Piterbarg's first feature is a noirish gem of character study that moves at a slow pace, the rhythm of the Delta, as it were. It's a slow burn, a build-up to the violence that has been implicit throughout the film, implicit in the Delta, which is shot with great creativity by Lucio Bonelli, combining beauty and threat, and always with a sense of confinment, whether is the apartment, the prison cell, or the Delta itself.

Mortensen, of course, can act in three languages, and the Tigre Delta is the same sort of evocative and ominous setting that the Louisiana bayou would be, when this film is remade in the States. Of course Mortensen won't be the star, but it will hard for anyone to match this performance, and along with The Hunt this has to be in the running for Crime Time's best foreign crime film of 2013.

Everybody Has A Plan is on release now

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)